Читать книгу Inseminations - Juhani Pallasmaa - Страница 55

Atmosphere seems to be a more conscious objective in literary, cinematic and theatrical thinking than in architecture. Even the imagery of a painting is integrated by an overall atmosphere or feeling; the most important unifying factor in paintings is usually their specific feel of illumination and colour, more than their conceptual or narrative content. In fact, there is an entire painterly approach, as exemplified by Joseph Mallord William Turner and Claude Monet, which can be called ‘atmospheric painting’, in the two meanings of the notion; atmosphere being both the subject matter and expressive means of these paintings. ‘Atmosphere is my style’ Turner confessed to John Ruskin, as Zumthor reminds us. The formal and structural ingredients in the works of these artists are deliberately suppressed for the benefit of an embracing and shapeless atmosphere, suggestive of temperature, moisture and subtle movements of the air. ‘Colour field’ painters similarly suppress form and boundaries and utilize large size of the canvas to create an intense interaction and presence of colour.

Great films, such as the films by Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky, are also steeped in their characteristic atmospheric continuum. Also, theatre relies heavily on atmosphere which supports the integrity and continuity of the story regardless of the often abstracted and vaguely hinted features of the place or space. The ambience can be so suggestive and dominating that very few cues of the setting are needed, as in Lars von Trier's film Dogville (2003) in which houses and rooms are often indicated by mere chalk lines on the dark floor, but the drama takes a full grip of the spectator's imagination and emotions.

Somewhat paradoxically, we can also speak of ‘atmospheric sculpture’, such as the sketch‐like modelled works of Medardo Rosso, Auguste Rodin and Alberto Giacometti. Often it is the atmosphere of the works, as the abstracted sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, that creates the unique sense of a singular artistic world. Artists seem to be more aware of the seminal role of ambience than architects, who tend to think more in terms of the ‘pure’ qualities of space, form and geometry. Amongst architects, atmosphere seems to be judged as something romantic and shallowly entertaining. Besides, the serious western architectural tradition is entirely based on regarding architecture as a material and geometric object as experienced through focused vision. Standard architectural images seek clarity rather than ephemerality and obscurity.

When describing his creative process in the essay ‘The Trout and the Mountain Stream’, Alvar Aalto confesses: ‘Led by my instincts I draw, not architectural syntheses, but sometimes even childish compositions, and via this route I eventually arrive at an abstract basis to the main concept, a kind of universal substance with whose help the numerous quarrelling sub‐problems [of the design task] can be brought into harmony’. Aalto's notion of ‘universal substance’ seems to refer to a unifying atmosphere or intuitive feeling rather than any conceptual, intellectual or formal idea.

Music of the various art forms is particularly atmospheric, and has a forceful impact on our emotions and moods regardless of how little or much we intellectually understand musical structures. That seems to be the very reason why music is commonly used to create desired atmospheric moods in public spaces, shopping malls and even elevators. Music creates atmospheric interior spaces, ephemeral and dynamic experiential fields, rather than distant shapes, structures or objects. Atmosphere emphasizes a sustained being in a situation rather than a singular moment of perception. The fact that music can move us to tears is a convincing proof of the emotive power of art as well as of our innate capacity to simulate and internalize abstract experiential structures, or more precisely, to project our emotions on abstractly symbolic structures.